Chapter 72: The Ultimate Burial Crypt

Without realizing it, another day slipped by.

Zion had spent so many hours staring at menus, opening terrain previews, closing them, reopening monster lists, and then doing absolutely nothing with them that time had started to lose shape. It was only when his eyes drifted toward the corner of his vision that he finally noticed the timer again.

[Founding Grace Remaining: 1 day, 14 hours, 27 minutes]

He stared at it for a long moment then opened his status.

[Current Essence: 30,318]

Thirty thousand essence.

Not long ago, that number would have made him feel unstoppable. It was enough money to buy floors, terrain, monsters, décor, traps, and probably several bad decisions on top of that.

Instead, Zion leaned back in his throne and let out a slow breath.

He didn’t feel better at all.

For the past several days, he had done almost nothing except think about Floor 4. Not even build it. Just think about it. He kept trying to come up with something smart, something clever, something that would finally solve the problem that had been clawing at the inside of his skull ever since the Brotherhood ran through Floor 3.

Invisible adventurers.

Teleporting adventurers.

Trap-disarming adventurers.

Fast adventurers.

Patient adventurers.

Every time he thought he had an idea, another problem followed right behind it.

He was so absorbed in it that he barely even paid attention when Gareth’s party returned to try Floor 3 again.

Normally, Zion would have watched immediately. Gareth’s group was one of the few parties he genuinely liked tracking. But when their instance appeared, all he did was glance at it, see their names, and then close the window again.

He just didn’t have the energy.

Zion sat there a little longer before lifting a hand to the collar of his robe.

"Maybe it’s this thing."

He stood up, pulled Grief off, and tossed it across the throne before dropping back into his seat without it. The throne room suddenly felt colder.

A few minutes passed before he let out a frustrated sigh and dragged one hand down his skull.

"Nope. Not the robe."

He stood again, picked Grief back up, and slipped it over his shoulders. The familiar weight settled around him, soft and heavy, and for a moment he appreciated it all over again.

Then, instead of sitting back down, he stepped away from the throne entirely and walked toward the middle of the room.

His footsteps echoed faintly against the stone. Once he reached the center, he lowered himself onto the floor and stretched out flat on his back, staring up at the ceiling.

After a moment, he folded both hands over his ribs. "Would it be cooler if I died here in the middle of the floor," he wondered aloud, "or on the throne?"

The question echoed softly through the empty chamber.

For the past several days, no matter how hard he thought, planned, or mentally simulated future attacks, every path ended the same way.

He died.

Maybe not immediately. Maybe not on the first day. But once the protection ended, his chamber would unseal. After that, it was only a matter of time.

Someone would make it through. Someone always made it through eventually.

"Well..." Zion said quietly, still staring upward, "it was fun while it lasted."

His voice softened a little after that.

"Just unfortunate I never got to give Finn his sword back."

That part actually bothered him more than he expected.

The golden-haired farm boy had somehow become one of the bright spots of his day. Zion could still picture him shouting out Sweeping Strike with all the confidence of a child discovering fire for the first time.

He smiled faintly to himself. Then, inevitably, his thoughts drifted somewhere else.

Lilith.

Long black hair. Pale skin. Ice-blue eyes. That cold, distant expression she wore like a shield around the rest of the world.

Zion’s eye sockets softened. He wouldn’t mind seeing her again.

"Maybe if I’m lucky," he murmured, "she’ll be the one who comes to end me."

A faint smile tugged at his mouth.

"Yeah," he said, closing his eyes. "Dying wouldn’t be too bad if it were her."

For the next hour, Zion stayed there on the floor of his boss room, letting one thought drift into the next.

He thought about the day he woke up as a skull and nearly lost his mind. He thought about his first sheep. His first chest. Lilith’s bracelet. Finn and his shovel. The absurdity of the Bone Zone. The Brotherhood using his trap floor like a training exercise. Grief. The Shadow Panther. The smell of failure that seemed to cling to every unfinished idea for Floor 4.

He even thought about dying. Not in the abstract way people sometimes did when they were being dramatic.

Actually dying...Again.

"I hope dying this time won’t be as painful..." he muttered.

The words lingered in the silence.

Then something strange happened. The dread that had been coiled inside him for days began to loosen. It didn’t disappear all at once. It just...thinned.

The pressure behind his thoughts faded little by little until all that was left was exhaustion. And beneath that exhaustion, something else slowly stirred. Excitement.

Zion opened his eyes and sat up. He stayed very still for a few seconds, staring at nothing.

"If I’m going to die anyway..."

The thought came fully formed.

He turned it over once in his mind, and the more he looked at it, the more obvious it became.

If he was doomed no matter what he did, then why was he wasting what might be his last day and a half trying to create the perfect counter to every possible threat?

Why not build the dungeon he actually wanted?

Zion pushed himself fully upright. His energy returned so suddenly it almost startled him.

"If I’m going to die anyway," he said, a little louder this time, "then I might as well build the dungeon floor I’ve always wanted."

He opened the store so quickly that the panel nearly snapped into place in front of him. Then he immediately went to monsters and scrolled straight to the section he always ended up visiting sooner or later.

Skeletons.

A ridiculous amount of excitement rushed through him. "I’m going to build the best damn skeleton floors anyone has ever seen."

And just like that, he was back.

Zion remained sitting on the floor in the center of his boss room while menu after menu floated around him. He scrolled obsessively through crypt entrances, broken mausoleums, cemetery terrain, skeletal infantry, burial guardians, grave décor, rusted fencing, decayed statuary, tomb lanterns, cursed braziers, and ruined architecture.

The deeper he went, the clearer the image in his mind became. He didn’t want just a generic undead floor.

No.

He wanted grandeur. He wanted sorrow. He wanted something that felt ancient and mournful and undeniably his.

"What if I make myself the ultimate burial crypt?"

Zion paused, then slowly grinned. He liked that idea immediately.

Not just a dungeon but a burial crypt.

A graveyard that led into darker and darker depths. Skeletons growing more ominous with every floor. A place that felt like a fallen kingdom mourning itself. And at the very end...

His chamber. His crypt.

Like the tomb of some long dead king who refused to stay buried.

"Now that’s epic."

He laughed under his breath. There was something morbidly funny about planning his own grave, but at least if he was going to die, he could make it exactly the way he wanted first.

"All right," he said, rubbing both hands together. "Let’s start with the descent."

He opened the terrain tab and immediately returned to the graveyard-themed environments. One of them caught his eye almost at once, because he had stopped on it before during earlier browsing sessions and forced himself to keep scrolling.

Now he opened the full preview without hesitation. The terrain expanded before him.

A graveyard stretched across a bleak landscape at the foot of a ruined castle. The path leading through it was uneven and old, winding between rows of weathered headstones and sagging burial mounds. Beyond them, in the distance, rose the black silhouette of a once-magnificent fortress.

Its towers were broken. Its walls had partially collapsed. And yet, even ruined, it was still imposing.

It looked exactly like the kind of place that once held kings.

Zion leaned forward. From afar, the castle had that same monumental feeling he remembered from old fantasy settings—something vast, ancient, and proud even in decay. Closer to the ground, the graveyard felt quieter. Smaller. Sadder.

This wasn’t a proud cemetery lovingly maintained by generations of descendants.

It looked hurried. Desperate. Like too many people had died too quickly, and the survivors had buried them with trembling hands before running out of time to mourn properly.

Dried black flowers had been scattered across many of the graves. Bent iron fencing surrounded parts of the cemetery in elegant, ornate shapes, hinting that this place had once been beautiful. Maybe even peaceful.

Now it felt abandoned to death.

Zion slowly rotated the preview and looked toward the sky. A pale moon hung above the ruins, full and cold and impossibly beautiful. Its light washed the graveyard in silver.

He found himself smiling. "Even the moon is beautiful."

His voice lowered.

"And full of sorrow."

He kept staring at the preview for several more seconds, already imagining skeletons rising between the graves, shambling patrols moving through the dead grass, and adventurers descending step by step toward the crypt below.

Finally, his thoughts weren’t spiraling. They were building.

Zion smiled wider.

"Cheers to the end of days."